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Channel 4, 9pm
The gently comic tones of Geoffrey Palmer describe the relationship between
the elderly Queen Victoria and her Indian servant, Abdul Karim. The Queen
loved Karim like a son. As far as she was concerned, he was warm-hearted,
cheerful, handsome, attentive and loyal — the perfect gentleman. He cooked
her curries, he filled her with stories and fables about his native land and
he gave her lessons in Hindustani. But he was loathed with a ferocious
passion by the royal household, who regarded him as the very worst sort of
upstart foreign nobody who didn’t know his place. And